MacWhisper for dictating notes

amahabal

I have recently started using OpenAI-based MacWhisper to dictate notes. Perhaps many of you have used dictation for your notes, but I find that Whisper has extremely high quality and gets things like punctuation, hyphenation, capitalization and so forth correct even with my strongly Indian accent. One of the benefits I have seen from doing this is that my notes have become somewhat more conversational than before. I find this to be a benefit rather than something bad, because it seems to be capturing what I am thinking now somewhat better. Perhaps this conversational tone of the note might be more relatable a few years down the line, but that is just a guess.

All the whisper models of all sizes are free but Macwhisper provides a free way of accessing these for the three smallest models. If you want to use the larger models you have to pay a one-time fee of $20 to make that possible. Perhaps other free tools even with the large models will become available soon. In terms of privacy, one of the good things here is that the model is sitting on your computer so the data never leaves the computer and it seems safe even for private notes for that reason.

ctietze

Thanks for sharing this info!

I've considered to use Whisper AI as well, but I almost never produce audio, so that didn't lead anywhere, yet

Fellow Mac programmer Sindre Sorhus published "Aiko" (and a ton of other free tools for other purposes, btw) that positions itself as the simpler MacWhisper for free: https://sindresorhus.com/aiko

Sascha

Many thanks for this thread. This is almost exactly what I searched for.